Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Is Occupy Wall Street going to represent a major turning point in U.S. history? Over the past several years, many people have been warning that we would see mass economic riots in the United States if the economy continued to get worse. Well, the economic riots are now here and America will never be the same. The Occupy Wall Street protests are starting their third week and now similar protests have sprung up in major cities all over the United States. An increasing number of Americans have totally lost faith in the system and are looking for an outlet for their frustrations. Occupy Wall Street is a spark that has started a fire, but most Americans do not understand where all of this is going. In the years ahead, millions more Americans will lose their jobs, millions more Americans will lose their homes to foreclosure and millions more Americans will find themselves drowning in debt. As the economy continues to decline, millions upon millions of Americans will become even more frustrated. In particular, young Americans are really starting to become angryabout the economy and our deeply corrupt financial system. Eventually we are going to see an explosion of anger and frustration on the streets of America that is going to be absolutely unprecedented. Occupy Wall Street is just the beginning. If most Americans could see what is coming next, it would chill them to their cores.

Growing up, most of us were taught that if we wanted to change things in America, we could do it at the ballot box. Well, today large numbers of Americans are realizing that both major political parties have been bought and paid for. They are realizing that things never seem to change no matter who we vote into office. They are realizing that signing petitions or sending letters to our “representatives” does not accomplish anything.

As the frustration of average Americans has grown, it has given rise to new political movements.

So far, the Tea Party movement has been the most prominent, and it has been dominated mostly by Republicans.

Now, Occupy Wall Street is becoming a national movement, and it is being dominated mostly by radical leftists and socialists.

Both movements have attempted to appeal to the growing core of libertarians in this country, and to a certain extent both movements have had some success.

But what all of this represents is a fundamental shift in the way that Americans view political change.

Americans no longer trust that politicians will listen to them. All of the recent polls show that satisfaction with the government is at an all-time low. People are deeply frustrated and large numbers of them simply do not believe that the traditional ways of bringing about change work anymore.

America is broken, and it is getting really hard to deny it.

In America today, it takes massive amounts of money to get elected, and most of our politicians end up deeply aligned with those that have huge amounts of money to donate to political campaigns.

Most Americans today feel like they have no voice. Many also feel like they do not have a legitimate choice at the ballot box.

So what happens when millions of Americans are deeply, deeply angry about the economy and the direction this country is headed, but they also believe that the political system is so broken that voting won’t do any good?

IF NOT NOW WHENThe world is changing The peaceful revolution of Occupy Wall Street has grown, is being greater supported and is being noticed. It has spread, to over 16 cities across the world, it is strong, very strong, in Boston, and Toronto and if you go to the Global Revolution site, or the Wall Street site, you will find more and more cities grabbing hold.

You want an eerily accurate prediction of these protests/uprisings? Robert Anton Wilson from 1990:"If the rate of increase of information does have the structure of a Mandelbrot set, as McKenna claims, by the year 2012 we should have information doubling every day and, later in the year, every hour and then every nanosecond. I can't imagine what this means practically in terms of social change, because every doubling of information in the past has resulted in totally unexpected social revolutions, violent or non-violent."

RT News: Global UPRising Just the Beginning!? American Uprising? Police in New York have violently dispersed an anti-Wall Street rally, arresting more than seven hundred people after a dramatic showdown on Brooklyn bridge. Thousands joined the movement dubbed 'Occupy Wall street' - in protest against what they call corporate domination. Radio host and author Stephen Lendman says the ever expanding protest shows awareness is growing among Americans that the country is run by people they never elected.

The Occupy Wall Street movement got a pro-bono boost last week from a not-so-underground source: a Manhattan public relations firm.

The largely anonymous protesters who've clogged Zucotti Park near the World Trade Center for the last two weeks—and who, on Saturday swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge—received what sources tell us was an unsolicited email blast from empathetic members of Workhouse Publicity.

The Chelsea-based PR firm—which, according to its website has worked with Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, Interview magazine, filmmaker Tim Burton, Bergdorf Goodmanand Saks Fifth Avenue—sent out the mesage, titled "Occupy Wall Street: News from the Front" to a number of media outlets, socialites and celebrities on Wednesday.

The message linked to a Facebook photo gallery that depicted black-and-white images of demonstrators and their protest signs.

The pictures were posted by Workhouse CEO Adam Nelson, and though the company initially declined to comment on the email, it later issued a statement: "We have no agenda and our service in this regard is simple: Publicize the message as the march continues."

The email blast sent by Workhouse also included the tag line, The Revolution Will Not Be Editorialized." which Nelson says is a reference to the protesters' frustration with the lack of press coverage during the early days of their lower Manhattan siege.

Nelson says he and several other employees, went down to document the protest last week and to "help out some friends."

He stressed, however, that the Occupy Wall Street organizers "didn't hire a publicity firm to spread their message."

Although Workhouse's association with the protest might seem at odds with the goals of high-end retailers and brands that have worked with the PR firm, Nelson says he "never even thought twice about sending out the email."

The Occupy Wall Street protesters have been criticized for lacking a unified message, but Nelson says the overriding theme of the movement, is "dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs..."

The Wall Street Shuffle - 10cc (1974) NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Egyptians did it for democracy. So did people in Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. Now, activist groups are hoping Americans will launch their own uprising -- in the form of thousands of protesters descending on Wall Street this weekend.

Occupy Wall Street is a "leaderless resistance movement" spearheaded by activist magazine Adbusters. Organizers want people to swarm into lower Manhattan on September 17 and set up camp for two months, then "incessantly repeat one simple demand."

The plan is to crowdsource the decision. Protestors are set to meet and discuss the issue at the iconic Wall Street Bull statue at noon Saturday, as well as at a "people's assembly" at One Chase Manhattan Plaza at 3 p.m.

The protestors' demand will likely be focused on "taking to task the people who perpetrated the economic meltdown," says Kalle Lasn, the editor-in-chief of Adbusters.

"The demand could be some stupid lefty thing like 'overthrow capitalism,'" Lasn says. "We're hoping it's something specific and doable, like asking Obama to set up a committee to look into the fall of U.S. banking. Nothing extreme about that."

Lasn says editors at Adbusters, which has a worldwide circulation of 100,000 readers, are angry that leaders in the financial sector "had not been brought to justice." Their inspiration came when pro-democracy uprisings broke out in Egypt on January 25 and quickly spread to other countries.

"We thought, why isn't there a backlash here?" Lasn says. "We need to shake up the corporate-driven capitalist system we're in. To do that, we needed something radical."

Adbusters posted a call to action on its blog July 13 -- originally asking for 90,000 people to join the protest -- and word spread quickly around the Internet. A total of 74 cities around the world are participating in "solidarity actions," and the event's official site will stream live shots of those events. The Wall Street headquarters is planning yoga classes, tai chi and music.

Last month, cyberactivism group Anonymous released a video in support of the protest.

"It gave us a nice bit of street cred, some mystique. We lefties need a lot of mystique," Lasn says with a laugh.

That mystique is what drew Josh Dworning, a 20-year-old college student, to shell out $300 for a 24-hour train ride from Florida to New York.

"I heard about the protest through StumbleUpon, and I just really agreed that there's widespread discontent with the banks and corporations," Dworning says. "I'm no crazy radical, just a student who believes in something."

Dworning is planning on sleeping in a tent near Wall Street on Saturday night, and he's "planning on staying as peaceful as possible" -- though he'll be on alert, because "there's always the chance that someone can get a little too angry and throw a brick or something."

That's what scares Dworning's mom, Jeanne Molle, who says she's "a nervous mother watching her son get involved in a large-scale event in the world's largest city."

Lasn is hoping safety won't be an issue. A "Gandhi-like peaceful protest" is the only way the event will work, he says, though he acknowledges that central control is impossible over a group that organizers hope will swell to 20,000. And "there is a question of legality" around setting up tents and barricades, he acknowledged.

The New York Police Department says it is prepared to deal with any situations that arise.

"The NYPD is aware of various protests and we have planned accordingly," Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne told CNN.

In a September test run of the occupation, nine people were arrested for disorderly conduct, and later released without being charged.

"It takes a lot to rise up and reform the global economic system," Lasn says. "And maybe this time we fail. But if we do, we're just setting the tone for the next revolution."

"The Wall Street Shuffle" is a single by the British pop/rock band 10cc released in 1974. The song originally appears on the band's 1974 album Sheet Music and was the second single to be released from the album after "The Worst Band in the World." It was also the most successful single to be released from the album making #10 on the British charts.

The songs is a heavy classic rock riff driven affair with lyrics that deal with Wall Street and the economy. It features several topical cultural references and specifically mentions Rothschild and Howard Hughes. In a BBC Radio Wales interview, Eric Stewart added: "We were crossing Wall Street in New York in a stretch limousine, celebrating the fact that we'd got in the charts with Rubber Bullets, and we'd gone across the big financial district of America there, and just as we were going across the street...

~ ~ ~

The Third Industrial Revolution Our fossil fuel-dependent consumer culture is no longer sustainable. Could a ‘Third Industrial Revolution’ driven by decentralised renewable power production lead to a healthier way of life in the post-carbon era? Excerpts by Jeremy Rifkin.

The History of Bioterrorism in America The following quotations, compiled from various sources, summarize the shameful but little-known history of the U.S. military's responsibility for exposing Americans to the terror of biological weapons.

Sharing Greece's asylum shame Greece’s appalling treatment of asylum seekers and migrants was, until recently, a blot on its reputation alone. But in November, the European Union and its member states became complicit in Greece’s shameful conduct when Frontex, which manages migration at the EU’s external borders, began deploying a multinational team of border guards in northeastern Greece along the Turkish border.

Just as the “guest officers,” in Frontex-speak, were arriving from across the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights, whose rulings bind EU states, barred Belgium from returning an Afghan asylum seeker to Greece because it would subject him to inhuman and degrading conditions in migrant detention centers there and leave him unprotected in Greece’s dysfunctional asylum system.

Diogenes of Sinope Diogenes’ talent for undercutting social and religious conventions and subverting political power can tempt readers into viewing his position as merely negative. This would, however, be a mistake. Diogenes is clearly contentious, but he is so for the sake of promoting reason and virtue. In the end, for a human to be in accord with nature is to be rational, for it is in the nature of a human being to act in accord with reason. Diogenes has trouble finding such humans, and expresses his sentiments regarding his difficulty theatrically. Diogenes is reported to have “lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, ‘I am searching for a human being’” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 41).

FAIR USE NOTICE

This blog may contain videos with copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Roots

Revelation 13

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy...

...And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?...

Mark 13

And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.